This is overall a pretty funny post, and gets better in the comments section.
Dear devs, how many players do you think you would have in your MMO if you follow this logic:
I farmed 8 hours yesterday evening in one spot in a game, and then bought my friend an ingame house with the gold…..am I botting? am I RMTing?- Anon (Gevlon talking to himself again?)
Pretty standard thing that happens in an MMO right? A dedicated player spends a large chunk of time enjoying your game, and then goes on to do something social with his friend, because they are both playing an MMO and not an sRPG. The above happens hundreds if not thousands of times every day in EVE, and likely millions of times in all MMOs.
Let’s see how Gevlon would handle this, shall we?
Yes, you are RMTing: you gave in-game wealth for some real world value (even if that’s not cash but some favor that your friend will return). Yes, I would negwallet your friend (take the house away) and suspend you for some time (assuming it was the first case). – Gevlon
First, it’s nice that Gevlon is redefining what RMT means to fit his insanity. Always a good first step when trying to make a point. “The sky is blue today.” “No, its green!”. “Um… no, I’m looking at it right now, it’s blue…” “I call that shade of color green, so I’m right, the sky is green! And also most likely involved in RMT!”. 2 months later, links to above as ‘evidence’ that everyone recognizes the sky is green.
Second, I love how not only is he punishing one person for playing an MMO, he is going after two. That’s the kind of extra stupidity that makes Gevlon worth reading, while also being example 1 billion of why no takes his ideas or suggestions seriously.
Bonus round: Who wants to sign up for this awesome MMO and pray you never get hacked (because MMO accounts never get hacked, right?), have your hacked account used illegally (again, that never happens), and then have Gevlon put your real name out on the internet for your future employer to Google, to say nothing of your now-banned account and future CC issues?
make accounts more personal. Demand credit card number for every account with a minimal monthly payment ($1-2) to make sure it’s real. If you ban, ban the credit card. Ban the computer ID too. Was his brother used the same computer and was paid with the same credit card? Too bad, at least he’ll have a talk with his cheating little shit brother.
– publicly shame exploiters. Just put it in your ToS that banned people will be listed with their account name and credit card number among the “exploiter” list. Also, hang their characters in the main city in-game for everyone to see.
Hardcore Casual 
And if the company doesn’t punish the player, then it is probably because of developer corruption, Gevlon’s go-to argument because he thinks anything that is simple to describe must be simple to implement.
Except that, in this case, Gevlon’s main post is onto something. It’s been a cause celebre in the BDO forums for about two weeks now – Gevlon is late on the scene; but the guy in the screenshot *has* been caught exploiting (again) and has received only a small ban. Arguably, it’s appropriate, because the exploit isn’t enormous (or rather, his use of the exploit is not that enormous), but it’s his second time being caught, and the first time – for a serious exploit – he had the more serious ban overturned because, in part ‘he wouldn’t risk his streaming career to exploit’.
Gevlon’s usual conclusion – the devs are corrupt, it’s all RMT – is as usual not valid; but the argument he presents: streamer was mistakenly let off once for serious exploit then is caught using another minor exploit and *doesn’t* have the book thrown at him – *is* a valid point.
Except repeating what Reddit already said wasn’t the point of his post. If his post was just “look, Streamer got caught and temp banned”, that would be fine, if boring and just re-stating actual facts.
The comedy and Gevlon-like aspects are the parts I highlighted above, because its at those points where he goes from simply reposting Reddit to giving his own opinions, and like clockwork, those opinions are batshit insane.
The Gevlon-spin on a known situation? That I can’t disagree with, no :)
I find Gevlon very hard to follow. His English is very lucid but there sometimes seem to be usages that suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of the words he’s using. His insistence on a specific definition of the word “game”, for example, seems to leave out several of the primary meanings of the word that a native English speaker would always include.
That, together with the tendency you point up to redefine words to suit his argument, mean that there’s often so much ambiguity in a given post that I can;t even work out what he intended to say, much less what he actually has said.
Even so, the first example you quote is spectacular. I guess that if go farm gold in GW2 for a few sessions so I can convert it to Gems, which I then use to buy an armor skin to gift to my wife as a surprise present I’m engaging in RMT and deserve a suspension. Although there are probably professors in Sociology Departments in Universities all over the world who’d think he had a point…
I always thought that Gevlon had overdosed on Ayn Rand at some point in his formative years.
I read his blog for a while, but stopped. It was too toxic for me.
He’s living proof of this quote:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
I thought his main post was quite valid in this case.
The comments go completely insane though.
Then again, Gevlon is not unique in what he does, many people who are very convinced/passionate about what is bad and what is good in their opinion do Gevlon’s ‘adjusting of definitions/reality/narrative to fit personal opinions’
Gevlon on Eve and RMT/Social aspects, SJW about feminism, BLM about redefining the term racism to make it so white people can’t be racist, Syncaine about WoW/Gevlon.
He does seem to be twisting a lot of things lately to fit into his own perception. I mean, the recents posts about “is it even a game” had me seriously scratching my head. I considered arguing for a bit, but whatever… I can accept that he’s set in his ways.
@Bhagpuss: Can you elaborate? Not being a native English speaker, I never had the same (literary) problems with his posts, barring the occasional wrong use of grammar or pronouns (i.e. fairly typical stuff when using a foreign language) which can be just ignored with ease.
I’ve read relatively little of Gevlon’s writing so it’s more of a surface impression than any kind of considered structural analysis. In fact, on going back and re-reading a couple of the recent posts I found hard to follow I find that it’s really the logic or the concepts that are throwing me off, not the missing pronouns (which actually work quite well to give the feel of an accent). So, I mostly withdraw that observation.
Re-reading the “is it a game” post, though, only enforces my feeling that there has to be some cultural gulf here that I’m just not bridging. I’m not a huge fan of going to the dictionary for authority but in this case it does seem an obvious step. The Oxford English Dictionary, which is as close as you can get to an “official” version of British English, gives the primary definition of “Game” as
“An activity that one engages in for amusement or fun.
‘the kids were playing a game with their balloons’ ”
That is, I think, pretty much what most British people would answer if asked “what is a game?”
The definition which Gevlon uses is the subsidiary meaning in the OED:
“A form of competitive activity or sport played according to rules.
‘the game of cricket’”
This is just as likely to be cultural bias on my end as Gevlon’s, though. British culture has a very strong tendency to allocate certain activities specifically to the realm of childhood. Games, like comics, is a term that a British English speaker will often hear with the word “children’s” in front, even though the context may not support that assumption at all. I’m not sure that an American or Australian English speaker would have the same prejudices to overcome.
I think it’s cultural and, of course, political and philosophical differences that make Gevlon somewhat hard for me to parse rather than language. Then again, I’ve never read Ayn Rand.